Claire didn't like that Kim had even noticed Shane, much less knew his last name. Eve didn't seem to mind at all. She just nodded, eyes wide. "They are, right? Man candy. We know!"
Claire grabbed her backpack. "I really have to go."
"Claire - you okay?"
"I'm fine," she said. Kim was kind of smirking at her behind her drink, and Claire had a wild impulse to dump that coffee all over her.
But she didn't.
"Bye?" Eve said, and made it a kind of pathetic question. Claire didn't answer. She just pushed past Kim's chair, not being too careful about it, and headed for the door.
Behind her, she heard Kim's clear, carrying voice say, "Wow, what crawled up her ass and didn't die?"
Claire threw a venomous look back over her shoulder, and saw Oliver watching her with a very slight frown grooving his forehead. Eve looked stricken, clearly surprised at Claire's departure. Kim . . . Kim wasn't even watching her. She just lifted one shoulder in an I-can't-be-bothered shrug.
Then Claire was outside, taking deep breaths of the dry air and lifting her face to the sudden, swirling push of the wind. Sand hissed over the sidewalk, blown in from the desert.
Claire, miserably aware that she was in a horrible mood, walked home with the feeling that everyone, absolutely everyone, was watching her.
4
Michael was playing guitar in the living room of the house when Claire stomped down the hall, dumped her backpack without much care for the electronic feelings of the laptop inside, and threw herself full length down on the sofa. Michael stopped in mid-chord, and she sensed he was staring at her, but she didn't look. Eventually, he started up again. The music spilled over her, beautiful and complicated, and as Claire lay there and just concentrated on breathing, she felt some of the awful tension inside her start to ease up. Still a horrible day, but she could never feel too angry when Michael was playing.
"So," he said, not looking up from the frets as he tried out a complicated new flood of sound, "I'm thinking of going electric. What do you think?"
"Eve dumped me. I've been best-friend dumped."
Michael's playing stuttered, then smoothed out again. "Huh. I'm guessing that's a no?"
"There's this girl, Kim? You know who she is?" Michael nodded, but didn't say anything. Claire felt her hands curl into fists, and deliberately, carefully straightened them out. "So this Kim, she's like perfect and all. Ooooh, she's an artist. And all of a sudden she and Eve have everything in common and I'm just - the stranger who doesn't get the jokes."
"I've met Kim," Michael said. His voice was neutral, and he kept his gaze on his guitar. "She's like a black hole; she just pulls people right out of their orbits. Eve's still your friend. She's just crushing on Kim because Kim never wanted to hang with her before."
"So what's the story of the fantastic Kim, anyway?"
He shrugged, and shot her a quick, unreadable look. "She went to OLOM, so I didn't know her all that well."
"OLOM?" Claire repeated.
"I forget you didn't grow up here. Our Lady of Mystery. Catholic school across town run by the scariest nuns you've ever seen. Anyway, Kim bailed on school when she was fourteen, I think. She's our resident funky-artist type, I guess - more likely to flip you off than shake your hand."
"I'll bet she sucks."
It looked like Michael was trying hard to hide a smile. "Art's always subjective. She may suck to you."
"She doesn't to you?" Claire felt a little sinking sensation. Oh, great, of course Michael would like Kim, too. Shane probably not only liked her, but had dated her, and was secretly still in love with her. Claire Danvers, New Girl, was probably the only person in Morganville who didn't think Kim was all that, supersized.
Michael stilled the strings on his guitar with the flat of his palm and sat back, finally looking right at her. "You should get to know her," he said. "She's - interesting. Just don't get too close."
"She treated me like crap."
"She does that," he agreed. "Did you know she survived a vampire attack when she was homeless and sixteen?"
Claire swallowed whatever she'd been about to say, which would have been snarky and sarcastic. Instead, she said, "Survived how?"
"Killed the vamp trying to drain her. She could have been executed - town rules. Instead, she was acquitted. No jail time. Brandon wasn't happy about it - he was Amelie's second-in-command at the time - but he had to swallow it. So really, there are only two humans in Morganville who've ever killed a vampire and gotten away with it."
"Kim and who else?"
Michael raised his eyebrows. "You didn't know?"
"Know what?"
"Richard Morrell," he said.
"Seriously?" Because Richard Morrell was now the mayor of Morganville, one of the three most important people in town, and it boggled Claire's mind to think that the vamps had allowed him to just . . . walk away from that. "When?"
Michael didn't have time to answer, because his cell phone started playing "Born to Be Wild," and he pulled it to check the screen. "Got to get ready," he said. "Sorry. Story time later. Hey, trust me, Kim's a force of nature, but like a storm, she moves on. Eve will be fascinated for a while, but Kim will find somebody else soon enough. It's how she rolls."
Claire had the really strong impression that he wasn't telling her everything. Or anything, really. But he didn't give her time to go into it, either, just storing his guitar in the case and heading upstairs.
"Get ready," she repeated, still simmering. "Yeah, everybody's got somewhere to be but me. You should get to know Kim; she's interesting." Claire put a load of mockery into her Michael impression. "Yeah right."